Altered States: Global Currents, the Spectral Nation,and the Production of "Asian Canadian"

Abstract

This essay offers speculative reflections on a Canadian nation currently renegotiating a crisis of time — a crisis manifest in a collapsed language of "presence" and the emergence of ''altered states" which are making the once familiar nation strange to itself. The infiltration of unpredictable global flows and temporalities in the post-cold war era has exacerbated the unravelling of a national identity formation that had been constituted through the colonial trajectory of its white settler origins. This movement, in turn, has given rise to conditions of cultural destabilization in which forces of reaction and resistance contend for the terms of a "beyond" that beckons. What remains of concern at this moment, then, are the critical ramifications of global capital and its cult of commodification, specifically in relation to the changing cultural reception of "minority" works that have been contained — and identified — through processes of racialization historically bound into "Canada" as a national identity. The question of "Asian Canadian" is thus situated at the intersection of history, the nationstate, and cultural ambiguities. Incorporating the example of Roy Kiyooka's poetry in Pacific Windows, this essay also addresses the critical limits of "Asian Canadian" and suggests the potential for the emergence of new cultural performances — and by implication new "localisms" - that account for the "spectral" effects of global uncertainties.